


fossil in stone

by miriya



Series: the land between tides [4]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: (but in a training sense), Character Study, Light Sexual Content, M/M, Scars, cor week 2018, mention of child abuse/injury, ninety-nine percent introspective (one percent bang)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-04 23:35:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16799281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miriya/pseuds/miriya
Summary: Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved?When Cor finally takes him home, Nyx has a moment of clarity.  A stand-alone that happens to slot nicely intotidescontinuity, for the promptscars.





	fossil in stone

**Author's Note:**

> “Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.”  
> ― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

It takes nearly two months for Nyx to notice them. 

Not because he hasn't been paying rapt attention, because he has — because his eyes are every bit as greedy as his hands and mouth when it comes to Cor's body — but there's something about the lifeless gray walls of his light-starved apartment that seems to suck dry the details of everything within their embrace.

But up here, high above the sprawling reach of Insomnia, Nyx thinks he finds a sort of clarity. Cor's place in the world is a boutique apartment in a boutique tower, the sort of place with an entire cadre of security guards to eye Nyx like an interloper despite the statement his uniform makes when he's led down their pristine corridors and into an elevator that wouldn't be out of place at all within the Citadel itself. No yellowing, naked bulbs to duel the shadows with their anemic glow — no, here the light is cold and pure, a stark illumination that lends an almost hostile sharpness to everything it touches.

(Even Cor had felt half a stranger beneath it, something oddly hesitant in his movements as he ghosted through this cavernous, coldly curated territory. Boots set carefully on a rug kept solely for their sake, heels and toes in perfect alignment. Keys in a porcelain dish on a showroom-perfect console table. Cor's jacket, draped over a thick wooden hanger, tucked inside a black lacquered armoire with at least five more of its kin. Vaguely disturbed, Nyx did his best not to be self-conscious of his graying, worn-out socks scudding over plush black carpet when he made his way to the wall of glass overlooking the city. How lofty. How quiet. How — lifeless.

For a half-second, he had been tempted to throw open the door to the balcony, just to fight back against the unpleasant sensation of sterile, dustless air scraping at the back of his throat.)

-

It's only in deep red heart of Cor's bedroom that Nyx finds signs of life and _living_ — only when he's got warm skin beneath his fingers, only when the tang of salt sits like a memory on his tongue, that the moment starts to feel real again.

In this cold, unforgiving light, he sees them laid out before him: faint, clean lines striping Cor's shoulders and flanks, the backs of his arms, lining the outsides of his thighs. An almost-lost road map marked in the echoes of ancient bloodshed, a secret topography uncovered. It startles Nyx, that it took so long to see, that he hadn't known. That there are _so many_ scars on this body he thought he knew so well.

His touch shifts, the moment's passion guttering in the wake of recognition. When Nyx presses his lips to the ghost of a long, thin slash threading between knuckles of vertebrae, he can't feel the difference at all.

Cor tilts his head, cheek pressed against his forearm, eyes gone dark and lidded heavily when he glances back over his shoulder. "Something the matter, Ulric?"

Is there?

Nyx smiles. Shakes his head and leans in to kiss Cor's temple, pressing his nose into the fine hair there. "Just — learning."

"Oh?"

A quiet hum of contemplation. Nyx wipes his slick fingers dry against his own thigh, then reaches up to trace over those ghost-white marks, unable to help his fixation. It's probably just old history to Cor, but — Nyx thinks he should have known, somehow. Should have been able to sense them, clear as the glow of a haven's runes. _Learning that I have so much left to learn._

Eventually, Cor reaches a sort of understanding. He breathes a slow sigh as he settles, not quite dislodging Nyx's touch with his easy shrug. "My old master didn't believe in training blades." Without any more feeling than what they've built between them; as if considering nothing more consequential than traffic. This new scrap of knowledge settles heavily in Nyx's mind as he lines it up alongside the things he already knows, fleshing out the image of the boy Cor once must have been just that little bit more — though in this context, Nyx shies away from dwelling on _that_ particular image. "Don't worry about it," Cor murmurs and rolls his hips, trapped between Nyx and his bedcovers and obviously impatient with the detour Nyx has taken.

"—hey, sorry." Nyx isn't, not really. There are more beneath his fingertips. Inert. Harmless, or so Cor might say.

After a stretch of lingering quiet, Cor twists his body beneath Nyx, rolling onto his back — reaching up to curl his long fingers over the sweat-damp hair clinging to the back of Nyx's neck to pull him down, _closer_. "Nyx," he murmurs, and it's startling sometimes how much warmth there is to be found just beneath the surface of that glacial regard, any perception of distance stripped away by honest concern. "It's nothing." 

Saying, really, that he means it. Cor still saves Nyx's given name for when he wants to be heard most clearly.

Right here, Nyx thinks, are the scars he knows. The ones that don't need the right light to rise to the surface. The ones that can leave a good, loyal man senseless to the memory of his own pain. Nyx knows now what Cor is; what he _was_ , and what this city and this war have made of him. He sees in that trajectory his own dissolution, because like knows like and he came to this far too late to armor himself — because inexplicably, Cor has let Nyx reach beneath those old wounds to touch what lies beneath, and now Nyx cannot help but answer. 

_It's nothing_ , Cor says, and Nyx can hear the creaking of keloid tissue beneath each syllable, blossoming out over the surface of a heart once too malleable to know better, and now too conditioned to recognize the difference. Holding taut, each time Cor can do nothing but reflect the concern turned his way, each time something lost clouds his eyes whenever Nyx muses on a distant future. The overactive immune system of the spirit, confused and afraid and uncomprehending, desperate to shelter what's most vulnerable — doomed, perhaps, to keep reaching in the absence of careful intervention, until what lies beneath is smothered and untouchable, safe at last.

Nyx closes that last span of distance between them, cradling Cor's face between his hands. Age-worn, careworn, oddly eternal and there is a selfish pleasure that accompanies the permanence of _Immortal_ , however false it might be. Nyx kisses him, silently pressing his sympathy into the space behind Cor's teeth where it's safest, sealing their mouths together to prevent an escape. He knows it's not the sign he's looking for when Cor's arm curls over his shoulder and holds tight, but it means something all the same. His lion with a wolf's heart, scarred and beautiful and _trying_.

"Guess I must be slacking," Cor murmurs into the hollow beneath Nyx's jaw, quietly affectionate and mostly unaware, "if I've let you get so distracted." Nyx breathes a reedy sound when Cor's hand slips down between them— a blunt if wholly effective solution to correct what he perceives as his own mistake in the absence of clear understanding. A reflexive response, heartbreaking in its honesty.

"You're a distracting kinda guy," Nyx whispers back. In the warm red center of this aseptic imitation of a home, Cor is _trying_ , and Nyx loves him for that almost more than anything. Thinks that he might give his life without regret to protect these chances.

But every experience has taught Nyx that he's a piss-poor protector, and that there'd be no mercy for either of them in the attempt. Instead, in this moment — bowed like a supplicant within the cradle of Cor's trembling limbs, pinned in place by the weight of those fearless eyes as he's guided inside — he allows himself to think that between his blades and his will and his careful attention, he might have some hope as a surgeon.

**Author's Note:**

> This one kind of wandered away from me, but today is the day and so here it is. (Soft-hearted Nyx; he'd be a bit gentler in his assessment if he'd gotten the full condo tour instead of being dragged immediately to bed.) Happy Cor week, nerds. <3


End file.
